TechLitAfrica: Computer Literacy in Africa with Tyler Cinnamon

In the developed world, it is easy to take for granted that we grew up with computers. Technology is so pervasive in the United States that we have debates about how early in child development a human should be given a smartphone.

Across much of Africa, there is a shortage of access to computers. Children grow up without much exposure to computers at all. Smartphones are starting to proliferate the continent, but the bandwidth limitations prevent the sort of unrestricted mobile Internet usage that many of us have in the west.

Tyler Cinnamon is a software engineer and the co-founder of TechLitAfrica, an organization dedicated to improving technology literacy and reducing poverty in Africa. TechLitAfrica takes old computers from the United States which are no longer in use and repurposes those computers with educational software and a downloaded subset of the Internet. Then, TechLitAfrica takes those computers to Africa and sets them up as computer labs.

Tyler joins the show to talk through the technical and cultural challenges of building TechLitAfrica.

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Transcript

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